arthly king kept swaddled up day after
day, to be publicly ridiculous. The fishermen, as I have said, pay him
no heed. The mayor, passing along the road, looks straight in front of
him, with an elaborate assumption of unconcern. So do the councillors.
But there are others who look maliciously up at the hapless figure. Now
and again there comes a monk from the monastery on that hill yonder. He
laughs into his beard as he goes by. Two by two, in their grey cloaks
and their blue mantillas, the little orphan girls are sometimes marched
past. There they go, as I write. Not malice, but a vague horror, is in
the eyes they turn. Umberto, belike, is used as a means to frighten them
when, or lest, they offend. The nun in whose charge they arc crosses
herself.

Yet it is recorded of Umberto that he was kind to little children.
This, indeed, is one of the few things recorded of him. Fierce though he
looked, he was, for the most part, it must be confessed, null. He seldom
asserted himself. There was so little of that for him to assert. He had,
therefore, no personal enemies. In a negative way, he was popular, and
was positively popular, for a while, after his assassination. And this
it is that makes him now the less able, poor fellow, to understand and
endure the shame he is put to. 'Stat rex indignatus.' He does try to
assert himself now--does strive, by day and by night, poor petrefact,
to rip off these fell and clownish integuments. Of his elder brother in
Paris he has never heard; but he knows that Lazarus arisen from the tomb
did not live in grave-clothes. He forgets that after all he is only a
statue. To himself he is still a king--or at least a man who was once a
king and, having done no wrong, ought not now to be insulted. If he had
in his composition one marble grain of humour, he might... but no, a
joke against oneself is always cryptic. Fat men are not always the best
drivers of fat oxen; and cryptic statues cannot be depended on to see
cryptic jokes.

If Umberto could grasp the truth that no man is worthy to be reproduced
as a statue; if he could understand, once and for all, that the
unveiling of him were itself a notable disservice to him, then might his
wrath be turned to acquiescence, and his acquiescence to gratitude, and
he be quite happy hid. Is he, really, more ridiculous now than he always
was? If you be an extraordinary man, as was his father, win a throne by
all means: you will fill it. If your son be another